Questions, Answered Plainly

One system in three parts. Tags go on products, places and people; a tap opens a Portal, your page in the browser; and Core is where you run it and keep the record.

The page a tap opens. It is built from modules, arranged as a journey, and welcomes back the people who have joined. It lives at your name on departmnt.io, or on your own domain.

The brand side: your tags, your Portals and everyone who said yes, on one record that belongs to you. Today we run it with you; self serve opens in beta to selected clients in the fourth quarter of 2026.

For mass distribution, a QR code is the better tool and cheaper. Print a QR code on a poster and anyone can scan it from across the room, or from a screenshot of it. That is the point of a QR code and it is a real advantage. A tap requires physical proximity to a specific object, which is what makes it usable as proof of presence rather than proof of interest.

No, and this is the one thing we will not compromise on. A phone against a tag opens a page. No download, no store, no account before anything happens. If a proposal you are reading requires an app install, it is a different product with a different failure rate.

Only if you tell them what happens when they do. On a retail floor with staff and signage, seventy three per cent of taps became a registration. On a garment tag with nobody standing next to it, forty one per cent of taps became an entry. Where comprehension was left to chance, most sessions ended inside a minute. The mechanic is not the variable; the on ramp is.

Every recent iPhone and Android phone reads a tag with no app: the phone is unlocked, held to the tag, and the page opens.

Not everywhere, and metal is the usual problem. An ordinary tag will not read reliably on or near metal, and a tag behind thick timber gave us trouble once too. Both are solvable with a shielded on metal inlay, which costs more. Otherwise it has run on an enclosed retail floor, across a city, and in an open festival field. The loop did not change; the creative did.

On its own, nothing about you. A tap records that a tap happened: which tag, when, and the category of device. It is a record of presence, not of a person. If you give an email address or make an account that is a deliberate act, and you can ask for that record or ask for it to be deleted.

You do, and we are the processor, which also means we cannot hand it to you in a form we do not hold. The brand is the controller of the records collected in its own activation. We process them under contract. In practice that means exports, deletion on request, and no arrangement where your audience quietly becomes ours.

Advance tags sign every tap with a one time code and cannot be overwritten once locked, so a copy fails. Standard tags carry a link and are a way in, never a proof.

Switch it off, or point it somewhere new, from Core. Nothing on the tag needs to change.

The calculator gives an estimate, not a quote. Hardware is priced per unit with quantity breaks, and the software is a subscription. The calculator on the pricing page puts both together for the first year, at our published prices, before delivery, with no VAT charged. Artwork, finishes and larger quantities can move it, so a brief gets you a firm figure the same week.

Longer than the software, and it is the thing that delays launches. Lead times run to several weeks depending on the format, and specialist stock runs longer. The build is rarely the constraint. Order the hardware first and design against it, rather than the other way round.

Nothing, unless someone decides to do something, and most people do not. A tag stays live and stays updatable. On one deployment, page views were still landing four months after the activation nominally ended. Pointing those tags at the next drop is a database change rather than a print run, which is the cheapest campaign anyone can run. It only works if it is somebody’s job to remember.

Not yet, fully. Today we deploy and manage it with you. Self serve is being built and the direction is deliberate: every activation we run by hand is a specification for the tool that replaces us doing it. Until then, the honest answer is that a first deployment involves us.

Every tier exports, and Label adds scheduled exports. Agency adds the API and webhooks once the API ships, and Network adds custom integrations.